Police hid the truth about her missing son for months

From Jon Schuppe for NBC: "Seven months of searching for her lost son brought Bettersten Wade to a dirt road leading into the woods, past an empty horse stable and a scrapyard. The last time she’d seen her middle child, Dexter Wade, 37, was on the night of March 5, as he left home with a friend. She reported him missing, and Jackson police told her they’d been unable to find him, she said. It wasn’t until 172 excruciating days after his disappearance that Bettersten learned the truth: Dexter had been killed less than an hour after he’d left home, struck by a Jackson police car as he crossed a nearby interstate highway. Police had known Dexter’s name, and hers, but failed to contact her, instead letting his body go unclaimed for months in the county morgue."

Do you think your plastic is being recycled? A huge amount of it is not

From Douglas Main at MIT Technology Review: "To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine. About 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding. A total of 95% of the plastic used in packaging is disposed of after one use, a loss to the economy of up to $120 billion annually. One-third of this packaging is not collected. What doesn’t get reused or recycled does not chemically degrade but rather becomes a fixture of our world; it breaks apart to form microplastics."

What happened when I took my husband to a nudist resort for the weekend

From Jeanette Cooperman for Common Reader: "A day at a nudist resort? The notion tingles, deliciously shocking. Then anger flares. Why should nudity shock me, or anybody else? We are born naked. Had God intended us to wear clothes, we would have popped out in tweed. When I reveal my plan, my friends’ eyes widen. They envision, I can tell, either debauchery or a throwback hippie commune. St. Louis has eighty acres of remote Ozark woodland forty-five minutes away. There, back in 1951, a group of friends bought a parcel of untamed land to start a nudist resort. I want to go there. Not as the usual gonzo stunt, with a journalist getting naked to tell her audience how it feels to be seen. I am too old to give a hoot. But I am curious: will getting naked feel free?"

Editor's note: If you like this newsletter, I'd be honoured if you would help me by contributing whatever you can via my Patreon. Thanks!

Scientists say spermatozoa appear to break Newton's Third Law of motion

From Maddy Chapman for IFL Science: "Newton's third law states that when one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite force back. In other words, “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. However, for biological swimmers such as sperm, this may not be the case. In a new study, scientists identified non-reciprocal mechanical interactions, which they call “odd elasticity”, that go against Newton’s third law. Sperm cells use hair-like appendages called flagella to move around. They propel it forward by changing shape as they interact with the surrounding fluid. They do so in a non-reciprocal way, meaning they don’t provoke an equal and opposite response from their surroundings."

Is Stockholm Syndrome real? The bizarre story behind a problematic diagnosis

From The Independent: "The pair of therapists, one Swedish and one Canadian, met for the first time several years ago in a Stockholm café, at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance. Allan Wade, who runs a family practice on Vancouver Island and has a particular interest in victim resistance and responses, was extremely curious to hear his Swedish counterpart’s thoughts on Stockholm Syndrome. But Kristin Enmark wasn’t speaking in her capacity as a couples therapist. She was speaking instead as a hostage in the 1973 Swedish bank heist ordeal that sparked the term “Stockholm Syndrome” in the first place. Her story suggests that everything we know about Stockholm Syndrome is a lie."

A 300-year-old painting stolen by a US soldier is returned to a German museum

From Claire Savage at Associated Press: "A baroque landscape painting that went missing during World War II was returned to Germany on Thursday. The FBI handed over the artwork by 18th-century Austrian artist Johann Franz Nepomuk Lauterer to a German museum representative in a brief ceremony at the German Consulate in Chicago, where the pastoral piece showing an Italian countryside was on display. Art Recovery International tracked down the elusive painting after a person in Chicago reached out last year claiming to possess a “stolen or looted painting” that their uncle brought back to the U.S. after serving in World War II. The painting has been missing since 1945 and was stolen from the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich."

A visualization of wingtip vortices created by an owl's wings